Moral Dilemmas of Fourth Industrial Revolution!

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) hold incredible potential to help the global economy stay on the cutting-edge of innovation. AI has opened up new markets and revolutionised critical domains such as health, education, energy and the environment.
However, as we enter the new machine age, we are set to be confronted by a plethora of moral dilemmas. Machine intelligence has surpassed humans in performance of certain tasks. The dilemmas such as should your driverless car value your life over a pedestrian's? or should we allow drones to become the new paparazzi? are leading to vehement demands for a new set of codified morals to become the global norm.
In an era where humans find it difficult to develop virtues for their own conduct, it is inexplicable how would they build relevant virtues in new technologies. But the ethical consequences of AI are vast ranging from immediate (how are the algorithms behind Facebook and Google influence everything from our emotions to our elections?) to the future (what will happen if self-driving vehicles mean there are no more jobs for truck drivers?). Following are the examples of ethical dilemmas we may face in the future-

1- Life Sciences- Should gene editing be made legal to create ‘designer babies’? What if you could undertake a little gene editing to increase your child’s IQ? What if these technologies were limited to only a wealthy people? What if you could patent a human gene?

2- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning- How do we ensure that AI technologies are ethically designed? How do we iron out biases from these algorithms which will determine job promotions, academic tracking of students and even choice of life partners?
Should we legalise predictive policing based on AI? Will artificial intelligence in the hands of law enforcement agencies usher in an era of surveillance state?

3- Social Media and Gadgets- What if our Kindles were embedded with facial recognition software and bio-metric sensors, so that the device could tell how every sentence influenced our heart rate and blood pressure? How do we prevent algorithms from providing customer-specific knowledge to marketers? How do we ensure that AI tools are not exploited to influence election results in particular geographies?

4- Bots and Machines- How to make machines emotionally intelligent? How do we influence what robots can decide? How do we decide what self-driven cars can decide? What about the rights of humans to marry robots and of robots to own property?

Such is the nature of technological breakthroughs that humanity will soon need to re-think morals – an Ethics 2.0. A global dialogue around ethics will be necessary to lay out a list of technologies that need governance, to assess the impact of each technology and to release a blueprint for their code of conduct.
This is not the first technology revolution and the concerns are not new. They have been around since the first industrial revolution. But, humans are good at adapting to changes, from steam engines to driverless cars and metros. As Bill Gates puts it, ‘technology is amoral’ and it is up to decide how to use it and where to draw a line.